Media content, such as advertisements, is created with the goal of having the content viewed or otherwise received by a target audience. Approaches for targeting such media content to these audiences have evolved substantially over the past half century. In particular, as information systems provided access to different sources and different types of data, advertisers added targeting strategies designed around such data. For example, as demographic data became available a few decades ago, contextual targeting—that is, targeting based on inferring audience composition from the context in which the advertisement is to be shown (e.g., a billboard location, a television program, a magazine, etc.)—had to share the spotlight with data-driven demographic targeting, either based on explicit demographic profiles or based on predictive modeling. As data aggregators coalesced and integrated information, such as magazine subscriptions and catalog purchases, psychographic data entered the mix and broadened yet again the space of targeting design.
With the advent of social networking websites, social network targeting approaches have emerged. A member of a social networking website establishes an account and creates relationships with other members and their accounts, thereby connecting the members in a network. When a member connects with other members by proffering or accepting invitations to link their accounts, those members are broadcasting their own social network. In addition to generating these links of association, members of these social network websites provide descriptive personal profiles that include their likes, their dislikes, demographic information, etc. These personal profiles and links to other members create a social network. Social network targeting approaches differ from the above-mentioned targeting approaches because they rely on these explicit linkages between specific individuals. For example, social targeting can include targeting consumers who are linked to each other by a social network or other network of established relationships. Subsequently, social networking websites, such as Facebook, have attempted to use their social network of members with established relationships to implement social network targeting for online advertising with varying degrees of success.
However, these targeting approaches, whether contextual targeting approaches or social network targeting approaches, call for the collection, storage, and use of direct personal information on multiple users. For example, as social networking websites continue to expand, additional social networking data about the users of the social networking websites is collected, stored, and used, leading to increased concerns relating to privacy.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide privacy-sensitive methods, systems, and media that overcome these and other deficiencies of the prior art. For example, privacy-sensitive methods, systems, and media are provided, where geo-social networks of user instances are created and used to target media content without using or storing data that identifies the user of a particular device or data that identifies the device itself and without using or storing device data, such as particular location information.